Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

Meet Ort. Ort is an only child, and because he has no brothers or sisters he never has anyone to play with. This causes Ort to use his imagination to a much further extent than most children ever do.Vimeo – Ludum Dare 22 – Alone

I participated in the Ludum Dare 20 Challenge and I’ll be returning for Ludum Dare 21. I’ll be using the XNA framework again this time. I may however, if the theme and my idea allow, work with HTML5 instead.

The models from the above image were created in my Ludum Dare 20 Entry.

I managed to finish my game. This was a bit of a twist for me, instead of spending way too much time on the code, I spent way to much time on the art content.

In order to do a 3D game, you pretty much have to have animations, unless you’re making a space game, or a racing game. So that meant that I needed to do animated models for my game. I haven’t done much of anything for modeling, animation, or texturing. This meant that the process of creating the art assets took a huge portion of my time. I think they turned out pretty nice though.

So because of jovoc’s post I started looking into Voxel modeling because I don’t have a Mac to use Sproxel. There are little to no free voxel programs out there. So after several hours of digging into it I found this solution, all free, and best of all, they’re all portable apps.

So the first step is to download Cube Kingdom Version 2.0. With this you can create your own Voxel models, the menu is in Japanese but you can get the jist of it. Once you’ve created your model, save it as the Metasequoia file type (mqo).

Next start up Metasequoia and import the model. Then save the file as a DirectX .X file, make sure to select Vertex Colors if you want to maintain your colors.

Next start up Blender 2.4x (2.5 no longer has a .X importer) and import your .X file. Now you can export as .fbx, .blend, or anything else.

You can also use Milkshape3D but Blender imports the faces as quads whereas Milkshape3D imports the faces as triangles.

This is the first time I’ll be participating in the Ludum Dare. I’ve been working with computer graphics and game design for several years now, dabbling in bits and pieces of modeling, shader code, programming, etc. I’ve done game jams in the past, and I’ve always pushed myself to create a 3D game. This game jam will be no different, I plan on creating a full 3D game.

I’ll be using XNA, C#, and several other graphical tools (Photoshop) to create my game. Following the rules of the contest, I’ll be using no other frameworks other than the base XNA framework and possibly some code from the samples provided on the XNA website. All of my code will be from scratch.

I’ll be posting a timeline of my work throughout the contest on Ludum Dare, and on my blog, along with HD video posts on Vimeo.